Trauma Sensitive Yoga
What is Trauma Sensitive Yoga?
I am level 1 and 2 trained in yoga for trauma and resiliency. When you experience chronic stress or trauma, your whole organism (all of you!) is affected and can s get stuck in states that don’t allow you to respond flexibly and dynamically to what is actually happening in the present moment. A healthy system is flexible and dynamic and can respond according to the changing needs of the moment–for example, you can have energy when you need energy, and rest when it is time to rest.
Yoga and the Nervous System
Yoga is an incredibly effective way to help restore the nervous system to it’s natural flexibility. Yoga helps you reconnect your body and mind through a focus on your breath and intentionally linking your breath with specific movements. It is a tool that can help you to restore the natural fluidity between rest and activity, contracting and expanding, and to commit fully to each.
Yoga For Anxiety
Yoga is a natural way of relieving anxiety, and it both helps decrease activation in the amgydala (the part of your brain responsible for interpreting danger and starting the fight or flight response) as you are practicing, and lower the baseline activation in the amygdala with consistent practice. This means less anxiety in the moment, and less anxiety overall.
Yoga for Trauma
Anxiety and panic are often unwelcome companions long after you are safe again. With traumatic experiences, there is too much intensity for you to be able to process and so you cut yourself off from your experience as an embodied being. Yoga not only helps to calm anxiety, but it can help you to feel more connected to your body in a gradual way that doesn’t overwhelm you. It can help you to feel embodied again. Trauma sensitive yoga simply means incorporating an awareness of the profound effect trauma has on the body into the yoga interventions we use in session. It means harnessing all the power of yoga and using it to a specific end: to help your body resolve the traumatic experiences that still live on inside of it and to restore the body to its natural rhythm and balance.